Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 10/6/22: Russia vs Ukraine, OPEC Production Cut, Iran Protests, Twitter Freakout, Capitalism, Men In Crisis, & More!

Episode Date: October 6, 2022

Krystal and Saagar analyze the Russia-Ukraine war, OPEC oil production cut, Iran protests, Amazon warehouse fires, Taylor Lorenz meltdown, Musk buying Twitter, victims of capitalism, & men dropping from the workforce!To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/To listen to Breaking Points as a podcast, check them out on Apple and SpotifyApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/breaking-points-with-krystal-and-saagar/id1570045623 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4Kbsy61zJSzPxNZZ3PKbXl Merch: https://breaking-points.myshopify.com/Chicago Tickets: https://www.axs.com/events/449151/breaking-points-live-tickets Nicholas Eberstadt: https://templetonpress.org/books/men-without-work-2/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. mainstream by becoming a Breaking Points premium member today at BreakingPoints.com. Your hard-earned money is going to help us build for the midterms and the upcoming presidential election so we can provide unparalleled coverage of what is sure to be one of the most pivotal moments in American history. So what are you waiting for? Go to BreakingPoints.com to help us out. Good morning everybody happy Thursday we have an amazing show for everybody today what do we have crystal indeed we do quite a bombshell dropped yesterday afternoon, actually, just before we were about to plan this show. The U.S. intelligence agencies agreeing basically with Russia's assessment of who detonated that car bomb and assassinated one of their citizens. Sort of, I guess, right wing. Would you call her intellectual daughter of a journalist? I don't know. There's pundit.

Anyway, we'll get into all of that. Quite a stunning revelation, though, as we continue to have concerns about whether Russia is going to ultimately detonate a tactical nuclear weapon and what all of that would mean. At the same time, this is also massive news. OPEC meeting deciding to cut production by quite a significant amount. That is certainly is almost certainly going to show up in terms of heightened gas prices for you. The Biden administration responding at this point with some pretty strong words, but a markedly different tone and approach towards Saudi Arabia from them. Also some political fallout, some comments that actually were quite good from

Ro Khanna, another senator, Chris Murphy as well. So we'll bring you all the political fallout and what that means. They also are moving towards easing some sanctions to potentially reopen relations with Venezuela. So a lot of movement there in terms of gas. At the same time, we still have our eye on those protests unfolding in Iran. We'll give you an update there and some details about what some of the underlying causes might be. There was a significant work stoppage at that Staten Island warehouse, Amazon warehouse, and Amazon has now suspended 50 workers there over that. So we'll bring you those details. Our own Jared and Cheriton has been reporting on that. And we've got a little update for you on Taylor Lorenz spreading COVID anti-vax misinformation. Yes, anti-vax misinformation. But this is the

allowed kind. Yes, right. The provoil Mm-hmm. But this is the allowed kind. Yes, right. The Pueblo came from her, so it's allowed, right? She's the hall monitor, so the hall monitor, I guess, can do whatever they want. Sagar's looking at Elon Musk

potentially buying Twitter and the freakout over that. I'm looking at comedian Bill Burr's kind of surprising comments about socialism and about capitalism. I have an interesting guest on to talk about what is going on with men, a new theme on the show lately. But before we get to any of that, live show. Live show. Put it up there on the screen. Chicago, we're planning it right now. We've

got an awesome segment. It's going to be a lot of audience interaction. As we said, go ahead and buy your tickets there. We've got the last remaining tickets. I think that people are really, really going to enjoy the show. We've got some fun stuff planned that we've learned from our debut in Atlanta, and then we're going to announce new dates very, very soon for the rest of the country. But like we said, if you're in the Midwest, I'd highly recommend coming to this show because it's very unlikely that we're going to do other dates. Just scheduling and the way that this all works out. Number two, counterpoints. Throw that one up there on the screen. They did a fantastic job yesterday. They really did. I was looking through some of their topics. I just love some of the things that they, I wouldn't

even think to cover, you know, Emily's monologue, things like that, which are just very unique to them as people, but they also touch on the news. You guys seem to really enjoy it. The show did quite well. So we've got that discount going on right now, 10% off on the annual membership, really helps us fund both that. and then obviously our new hire, which was made entirely possible by the expansion that you guys are funding. So thank you all very much. There's a link down in the description that you can take advantage of. Yeah, one of the things I was a little bit nervous about when their show launched

was that we'd be stepping on each other's toes in terms of covering the same topics. Really not. I mean, they do have a different lens. Different things pop up and are interesting to them. And they also have slightly different ideologies than we do. So I think it's been a really great addition to the ecosystem. You guys seem to think so as well. So thank you for helping support us and make that happen, make the new hire happen and all of those good things. Okay. With all that being said, let's get to the news. Let's get to the big bombshell, really.

Let's go and put this up there on the screen. A major leak in the New York Times dropping yesterday. Very coordinated, and let's read it all very carefully. The headline, U.S. believes Ukrainians were behind an assassination in Russia. Subhead, American officials said they are not aware of the plan ahead of the time for attack that killed Darya Dugina, and they had admonished Ukraine over it. So let's go and take a trip down memory lane. A couple of months ago, we covered the story in August that Daria Dugina, who is the daughter of Alexander Dugin, who himself is, I don't even think calling him left or right wing is really all that useful in the US political context.

He's an uber nationalist. Ultra nationalist, revanchist Russian who believes in restoring the glory of the Russian czardom and empire. That's probably it. Then very anti-European union. Very socially conservative. Very socially conservative, but not even necessarily in the context. We would understand more in the Russian Orthodox Church and the fusion of the state. Something that you would have to go like 100 years back in order to really understand in Russian context. Anyway, so this is a Benton intellectual, quote unquote, in Russia for quite some time. Frankly, probably overstated by the West and even

by the Ukrainians in terms of his influence. He's been sidelined before by Putin, but they like to keep him around because he always justifies their invasions of Georgia. He was beating the drum for years about invading Ukraine, saying it's not a real country, etc. So you could think of him as, I don't even really know if he has a US analog. Whoever the most neocon of neocons was in the middle of the Iraq war. Think about the guy who was defending Bush in 05. That's basically the equivalent of who Alexander Dugan is. Anyway, his daughter, as we said, was blown up in a car bombing in Moscow, a Moscow suburb. Now, it was believed at the time that he was the target and that his daughter actually had gotten into the car. And as she was driving down the road, that her car blew up as she was driving. She was only

29 years old. Lots of speculation about what happened, including here on this show. At that time, we had a couple of theories. Number one was this could be a false flag by the Russian state authorities. You take out somebody who is supposedly sympathetic, you blame it on the Ukrainians, and then you say this is a pretext

for eventual escalation against Ukraine. And by the way, after his daughter was killed, what do you think Alexander Dugin called for immediately, right? So that was one theory. And again, there was really no way to know, and it's not like he would put that against the Russians. The Russians, though, at the time, adamantly claimed, and look, it's not like they have a lot of credibility,

so you should take it for what it is. They were like, no, we believe this was the Ukrainian intelligence services. They had pictures that they had released of the so-called assassin. They said that she was an employee of Ukrainian intelligence who had crossed from Estonia into Russia. Well, I think it was from Ukraine to Russia and then fled to Estonia. That's right. So Ukraine, Russia, Russia, Estonia. Estonia matters also because it's a NATO country and as to whether they even knew about it in the first place.

Anyway, basically what we said and most people said at the time is, we'll never know. Well, now, I guess if you are to believe them, and of course, this is always the issue, who do you take the word for? The Russian FSB, CIA, Ukrainian intelligence services? I feel like when they agree with each other,

then you might be able to say this is probably what happened. It's possible, yeah. It's very possibly credulous. I'm trying to treat everybody as skeptically as I can. Anyway, I think the fact that this article exists in and of itself is very noteworthy because it says that the United States intelligence agencies have concluded the parts of the Ukrainian government,

that's another key part, were authorized the car bomb attack near Moscow in August that killed Darya Dugina. That intelligence assessment was made not necessarily declassified, but was made widely available to the U.S. intelligence community last week. That tells me something very important, Crystal, which is that they have had this assessment now for quite some time. It's October 6th. This happened on August 21st. Why now? There's a lot of questions. One of the time old tactics in the US intelligence community is if you want something to leak, you just make it more available to as many people as possible. And that is exactly what happened here because almost immediately after it was made widely available, it ends up on the front page of the New York Times. So what can

we take away from this? It says specifically in here that the U.S. was not aware of the attack, took no part in the attack, and had privately admonished the Ukrainians for doing something like this. important to me is they also said there it is possible that Zelensky himself did not know about this. And they allude in the piece to competing centers of power in the Ukrainian government, as in intelligence services that may or may not actually answer to Mr. Zelensky. This is a country in the middle of a war. Before this, it's not a secret that they had a lot of corruption. Zelensky himself has already fired two of the most senior people in the Ukrainian government not only that long ago. They also had these sort of like independent militias that have just recently been incorporated into the overall armed forces. Exactly. The parties also have had, it's political turmoil in Ukraine. More and less

hawkish factions, different ideologies, all of those things. This is a classic hallmark of any state basically in the middle of an existential conflict, especially one without robust institutions like Ukraine, which was already had corruption problems as the beginning of this. Now, I think that the major takeaway from this to me, and I'm curious what you think, is they are releasing this and leaking this now because Ukraine, A, either has already done something just as highly provocative or was on the verge of doing something highly provocative. And this is kind of a bat signal to be sent out into the world and just be like, hey, we know what you did. Clearly also, they said that they

had admonished them. If the Ukrainians had listened to the so-called admonishment, I don't think that this piece would have showed up. They probably said, screw off, or they continued to deny it. Hence the leak that comes out that really cast them. This is one of the first stories I have ever seen that really admonishes the Ukrainians for going into a territory which is incredibly dangerous. I mean, they carried out, if we are to believe this, an assassination inside of Russia, not just inside of Russia, against a high profile figure in Moscow, in the capital of Russia. I mean, you cannot think of something that is more provocative than that. And it also opens the question of like, what other covert operations are the Ukrainians doing that the US may or may not have a proof of?

It also, the second thing I just want to highlight before I get to what your takeaway is, Crystal, is they said that the U.S. officials remain frustrated that Ukraine refuses to share intelligence or military plans, especially covert operations inside of Russia. And they also said, Crystal, that often, especially before this latest round of offensive by the Ukrainians, the Ukrainians did not want to share military plans. They did not want Washington to get inside specifically because, A, they didn't want us to either adjust aid or not. They wanted us to just take their word for it. And they like to keep us in the dark as possible while the checks continue to roll on in to keep our input to an

absolute low and let them do whatever they please. So lots of commentary on that front as well. Yeah, well, indeed. I mean, the first thing to say about this is that this is utter madness. I mean, we're talking about a political assassination of a civilian, a Russian civilian on Russian soil. Like the level of escalation that that represents is dramatic. And I know that a lot of people out there will be like, come on, like Russia invaded their country. Like they're getting bombed. This isn't like you're going to freak out over this.

This is all in the context of trying to avoid a nuclear war. So again, an attack directly on Russian soil, a political targeted assassination on Russian soil of a Russian civilian in Moscow, where then the assassin flees to a NATO country, Estonia. This is mind-blowing bombshell stuff. In terms of this report and sort of what I have the most confidence is true and what I have the least confidence is true, when you have the official Russian line lining up with the official U.S. line, I think you can put a lot of credence in that. And the Ukrainians have not really outright denied that they were involved in this either. So I think that's all important to keep in mind.

So that's the piece that I actually have the most confidence in. The parts about, oh, you know, the U.S., really the intelligence community trying to paint themselves very well here. We had no idea. We had no involvement. The parts about, oh, maybe Zelensky didn't know, trying to sort of keep his hands clean in all of this because, of course, he's been held up as, you know, the Churchill of the whole situation. Those are the pieces that maybe it's true, maybe it's not true. I'm a little bit more skeptical of that part. I think you're right about the likely intent of this leak, because all of these leaks that, you know, from directly from the intelligence community, they all have some sort of political intent behind them. I think probably you're right

that the most likely thing here is that the U.S. is getting increasingly pissed off that the Ukrainians are freelancing and in this sort of like adventurous, incredibly dangerous, potentially escalatory way and are not scaling those things back. And so this was a way to really try to ultimately smack them down. Right. I think it's also really worth underscoring the fact that we covered that report a while ago. It was some of the only like a little bit critical coverage that we've seen from the New York Times about how the U.S. was openly admitting they had more insight into what Russia was doing because, of course, we have decades and decades and decades of infiltrating them, spying on them and all sorts of assets there. And we really were kind of blind about what the Ukrainians were doing and what

their plans were. Now, after that report, there were subsequent reports that were like, oh, we worked that all out and that's all fixed. No, no, that does not seem to be the case. That does not seem to be the case. And so from a U.S. domestic perspective, think of the insanity we're engaged in right now. I mean, we're going to talk about more military aid flowing there. We've helped them with intelligence. We've helped them with cyber capabilities. I mean, we are all in on this war effectively in all but, you know, the reality of boots on the ground. And we don't know what their plans are. They're hiding things from us. They're engaging these sorts of like targeted assassinations with our terms of what is happening there.

They could not have gotten anywhere close to where they are now without our arms, our training, and our intelligence. We have incredible influence over what and how they prosecute this war, and we ought to be using it because this is complete insanity. Yeah, and I just want to pick and tug on that thread, which is, look, if Ukraine wants to put itself in a position where they are going to assassinate people on Moscow, be my guest. But then the risk is all yours and it's not ours. Yes. And unfortunately, though, they want to take the most provocative action and then socialize the risks to us and to all of NATO. That is the issue. And also the issue remains, if we are going to continue giving them essentially 98% of what they ask for, then what good is any admonishment? I mean, frankly, the Ukrainians kind of remind me of the Israelis right now, where they're like, yeah, they're not going to

do anything. They're like, we got too much pressure. They're like, we can do basically whatever we want. You know, we can, you know, we can have a sovereign territory if they wanted to, like the Israelis, violate the law, have the UN or even the US intelligence community privately admonish them. But at a public level, like they know that they could basically get away with it. And, you know, that's basically what happened. Let's put this on the screen. I mean, effectively, days after the U.S. supposedly admonished the Ukrainians, the U.S. announced another $625 million in new military aid for Ukraine, again, more than the country of Germany and France in total, just so everybody's aware. And that military package is all after the annexing of the four regions. There is some speculation, Crystal,

and behind the scenes from people I spoke to is that one of the reasons that this came out is because President Biden had a very long phone call with President Zelensky just right before that they released this aid. It's like Tuesday, right? It was on Tuesday. And during that phone call, it was right after they announced this aid, though, it is posited that he probably brought up this U.S. intelligence. It was like, hey, maybe you should cut this out. And, you know, I don't think that they would leak it without some authorization at the highest levels of government, that there was at least a feeling that the Ukrainians were going too far, were not listening, were telling us to effectively screw off. So this really just highlights the duality of Washington policy.

On the one hand, we give Ukraine almost 98% of what it wants, support all but their most maximalist of maximalist aims. And on the other, we're like, hey, stop assassinating people inside of Russia. Now look, as you said, the Russians do this stuff all the time to their own citizens and in Ukraine. So it's not like we're saying that Russia has been unfairly given something that it never does. No. I mean, they've probably done this on an even bigger scale. But it does really remind me, I know this is hokey, but like of that Dark Knight quote where it's like, you either die a hero or just live long enough. You know, it's like, why become even a part of your enemy?

And because then at what point do you remain the moral high ground? Because, of course, Ukraine was invaded, a sovereign country, didn't do anything to Russia. It didn't do anything to them. But embracing these horrific tactics of targeted political assassination is both incredibly risky for your own nation and highlights how existential they think the stakes are. And if they think it's that way, again, that's fine for you. But your risk should remain yours. We are now in a situation where, and I think you probably agree with this,

I don't see a situation where if things escalate to the nuclear level, even quote-unquote tactical, that we don't somehow get dragged into this war. I see no situation. I can't imagine it. I really can't. I mean, it's very hard to imagine that there isn't then an escalatory chain that leads at the very least to us being directly involved, let alone, you know, and certainly could possibly lead to all out nuclear war, which is the thing that we should. Because we're literally in a – we have never since the Cuban Missile Crisis been this close to a nuclear exchange. And it's like – it's sort of like the plot of Don't Look Up where everybody's just like continuing to go about their business and media is like barely paying attention. And, I mean, none of this has really been laid out and explained to the American people what an incredibly precarious, dangerous situation we're in. And why this report struck me in particular is because it was a reminder of the fact that within the Zelensky government and domestic

political, you know, hothouse, there are factions that look at nuclear weapons sort of the way that Putin and the Russians seem to, which is also believing like, oh, well, you know, it wouldn't be the end of the world. It's worth risking that potentiality. And I say that because Yegor actually pointed out to me, there's, you know, a sort of influential commentator ally of Zelensky who outright said like, oh, the West is so afraid of nuclear weapons. We're not that afraid of it. Like, all full of bluster. I mean, there is that faction. And there's even more of a faction that, from the beginning,

has been very interested in trying to escalate this war, to force us in on the Ukrainian side. I can't even blame them for that, because that's just, like, rational when you're facing an existential threat. I want my big brother to come in fully on my side and stop messing around with this, like limiting what weapons we can get and playing cute like they're not involved here. I want them all the way in. And so when I see this sort of, you know, dangerous adventurism with a political assassination

on Russian soil, it reminded me that, you know, for them, if there is that escalation, it's not all bad in their view. That should be another, like, dire warning for us and reminder that we have to be really, really careful about protecting not just U.S. interests, like the interests of the world as a whole. And that's what this really ultimately underscored for me, because this is just an incredibly, incredibly dangerous situation. And the fact that we have gone this far with the U.S. still having a lot of blind spots about what exactly the Ukrainians are up to, that should be deeply, deeply troubling to everyone who's looking at this. That's right. And let's put this on the

screen finally, just for people who are interested. This was the official blame by Moscow on Ukraine in that death. As we said, the circumstances are they accused a Ukrainian intelligence agent of crossing from Ukraine into Russia and effectively then fleeing into Estonia. Estonia, of course, matters because at that time, they said there would be a reason for the Russian Federation to take actions against the Estonian state. Estonia is, of course, a NATO country and has been one of the biggest beaters for war, which we're about to get to. So there also could involve a NATO intelligence service, which itself would also be a tremendous danger given the fact that Article 5, I mean, even if

the United States did not know about this and admonish them, remember, we are bound by blood all the way up until the borders of the Baltics with Article 5. That's why, I mean, I've gotten some pushback from people like, no, there's no way the U.S. would. I'm like, no, you don't understand. Like, this is just like 1914. Like, in terms of the alliances, like, we are of a tripwire. These are Senate ratified treaties. There's no debate. It's automatic.

Like, if they go in, we're in. If there is some sort of escalation or something, like, we don't have a lot of say into how exactly it's all going to play out just because the escalation ladder goes up very, very quickly. And that gets to the next part. Let's go ahead and put this on the screen just to highlight how the Baltics feel. Poland says that has been now approaching the United States, and this makes sense because the Polish foreign minister was just here, about storing nuclear weapons inside of Poland, US-provided nuclear weapons. Poland is boosting, obviously, its military spending. They say, and this is according to their president, that the US and NATO have said they have, while they have said they have no plans to deploy nuclear weapons in Poland ever since they joined the NATO alliance after the fall of the Soviet Union, that they have risen and asked this

at the highest levels of Washington. President Duda of Poland says, quote, the problem is we don't have nuclear weapons in a Polish newspaper that was published on Wednesday. Quote, there is always a potential opportunity to participate in nuclear sharing. This would effectively be a return to the Cuban Missile Crisis days, like whenever the Soviets were trying to store ICBMs in Cuba, 90 miles off the coast of the United States, and also highlights one of the original protests by Vladimir Putin. I'm not saying he made this in good faith,

but I'm just saying, look, the guy invaded Ukraine, we should at least listen to what he said. What he pointed out, and you and I covered this story at the time, was that ballistic missile defense system that we do have in Poland, and he was saying that this is a provocative action, and it was almost like a, it's almost, it reminds a bit of like the Jupiter missiles in Turkey and like what exactly they wanted away from them and why they justified

the Cuban deployment in the first place. Anyway, all of it. We were saying these are purely defensive and they said these could easily be converted into being offensive and strike within our borders very quickly. Yeah. That was part of the rub. That's why it matters. Anyway, the point is here is that our Baltic allies in NATO are the most hawkish when it comes to this war. They have, per their GDP, have actually spent a tremendous amount of money.

Again, not that much overall. But to be fair to them, per their very small GDPs. They've also taken in a lot of refugees, Poland in particular. Tons of refugees. I think it's been the number one location for Ukrainian refugees. And we can't ignore. I mean, these people lived under Soviet communism and were slaves to the Russian Empire before that for a very long time. As I said, Poland and Warsaw is one of the saddest places that you can go because you'll go to some museum and they're like, yeah, and then we heroically resisted against the Nazis. And then we were conquered by the Soviets. And you're like,

oh, geez. And you're like, yeah, and then we were finally free in 1989. And you go to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier there in Warsaw and you're like, he was killed by Russia. He was killed by Russia. He was killed by Russia. This is a freedom fighter. He was killed by Russia. So anyway, the hate runs deep and I get it. I mean, I genuinely do. If I was Polish, I'd probably feel the same way. However, of course, their collective interest is not necessarily the same as ours. And so they are very much beating the drum and are the forefront of saying, no, if there is any tactical nuclear explosion in Ukraine, all-out war on behalf of NATO. Polish foreign minister is the first person to come out

and say, absolutely, we will have a pure conventional military response. We will attack Russia if they go ahead and launch a tactical nuclear strike. Second, also a lot of noteworthy comments from the president of Estonia, Baltic nation also in Estonia, dealing and talking in English in an interview specifically about how the West should respond should Putin use tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine. Let's take a listen to what she said. They were claiming that there are little green men. Now they're openly attacking another country. And this is a totally new perspective. They are threatening with nuclear weapons. There has to be a very strong response. If this pays off, then they will use it again and again, because this pays off.

And we say that, okay, now we are afraid, and now we do what you say. You don't negotiate with terrorists. And terrorism is to terrorize us to make different decisions, not help Ukraine, not make the decisions that we would otherwise make because we are afraid. Well, I think that this is, look, I think it's a valid point and it bears really parsing, which is what does the world look like if somebody uses nuclear blackmail? Well, we have had a test case. I talked about this previously. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, we actually did have a secret nuclear quid pro quo. We're like, look, you take those missiles out of Cuba, a couple months later,

later, these Jupiter missiles in Turkey, they'll just so happen to go away. Now, to be fair, those missiles actually were obsolete, so the Soviets did kind of get duped. But in their minds, they did feel as if they got some quid pro quo. I also think that it really matters. And this is why I believe very strongly in red lines, in Senate ratified treaties, and in alliances, which is that, look, if this were to be used against a NATO country, obviously the answer is no. And also, if you do go to war with a NATO country, there's not a question. It's in the gray areas where we actually have no obligation of defense. There's been a recent resuscitation, by the way. This is bears discussing. So there was this thing called the Budapest Memorandum in the 1990s after the fall of the Soviet Union, where the United States,

Russia, and there was one other country, I can't remember exactly what it was, effectively guaranteed Ukrainian security and said that they wouldn't attack Ukraine unless there was some imminent threat. Now, obviously, Russia has already violated the Budapest Memorandum, but people are saying, oh, well, that is the reason why the US has to come to Ukraine's defense. First of all, the Budapest Memorandum was a statement of policy by the administration. It was never ratified by the US Senate, and it is not the actual word as an actual treaty is like NATO. And what I love about that is that people who are like, we have to defend them, are the same who are like, yeah, yeah, yeah, just because a U.S. Secretary of State told Gorbachev that NATO would never expand doesn't mean that we had to because

he didn't bind our hands in the treaty. See, people? It can go both ways in terms of what exactly these things mean. What our obligations are, yeah. Look, you could say morally we have an obligation, fine, but that's not how the law works and that's not how alliances work. My point here being that whenever we are talking, especially about nuclear weapons, and I'm not saying it's a good precedent to set, but we have certain realities that we have to face. North Korea launched a second ballistic missile yesterday. People in Japan are freaking out. They had a 2,600 mile overfly over the Japanese EEZ.

Their TVs were all blaring. And you know why we don't invade or bomb North Korea? Because they have nukes. They could literally nuke California. They have the capability, and frankly, they have the will if we wanted to. I'm not saying it's a good situation, but it's one of those things that we basically just had to learn to live with. The moment that they developed an ICBM that was capable of hitting the United States, the strategic situation

changes. We have to deal with the reality of the ground while balancing the downside risk. I think that that is exactly highlights why this type of rhetoric can both have a point, but does not consider the reality, which is that in Ukraine, we do not have an obligation to defend Ukraine. We have decided to out of the goodness of US policy because Americans I think are good people and they don't wanna see a sovereign nation get invaded.

And there's all the norm reasons, the global order, et cetera. Sure, I think it's a fine policy for arming to a certain extent. But when we have to balance it then with, well, in the event that somebody uses nukes, we then have to get into a, again, against a non-NATO country of which we have no treaty obligation to defend. And then the US must then enter into a war where we will then probably have to use nukes to prevent nuclear proliferation. It just becomes madness very quickly. To me, what I hear from the Estonian prime minister and what I hear from a lot of people

is this sort of sloganeering, you know, like, oh, we don't negotiate with terrorists, or they throw out the word appeasement and want everybody to think of Neville Chamberlain and World War II and all of that. Listen, this has not gone well for Russia. So even if, I think at this moment, it's fanciful the idea that you could have any sort of deal, ceasefire, peace treaty, whatever. I think we're not in a place where that's likely to happen in the near term, which is a tragedy in and of itself. But the idea that Russia would end up getting anything out of what they did, there's this argument that like, oh, well, that's just going to embolden them to do this again, or some other country to go and take over territory and just use the fact that they're a nuclear power or that they want it and that Russia got their

way last time to go ahead and then take over whatever they want. I think that that's incredibly, I think it's incredibly facile thinking, because to believe that you would have to think that this has been a win for Russia and a win specifically for Putin and his regime. When in reality, I mean, he's been exposed as incredibly weak. Their military has been humiliated over and over again. You know, even just from the practicality of being able to, like, you know, rebuild the military and try this over again. Like, they weren't even able to do the buildup in the first place. So now that they've had this mass casualties and so much of their equipment lost and all of this stuff,

like, even the idea that they would practically be able to do this again in some other place, this mass casualties and so much of their equipment lost and all of this stuff, like even the idea that they would practically be able to do this again in some other place, I think is a little bit simplistic and facile. So to imagine that, you know, Russia coming away with anything, even like acknowledging them in Crimea, like sort of de facto allowing them to have Crimea, that that's going to ultimately overall constitute a win for them. I think it's silly. Their economy is crushed. Their international pariah, their own citizens are fleeing. Putin's power is weak as it has ever been. His regime is legitimately like under threat to what extent we don't really know. But there's no doubt that this has created a lot of domestic turmoil and instability for him. So this has not gone well.

There is no country with any sort of sane rationality that would look at the situation and be like, that was great for them, and I would love to repeat what they just did. So I think that's really important to keep in mind. The other piece of this that, again, I think is a little bit facile is to pretend like you can just hand wave away nuclear weapons

and we don't negotiate with terrorists. This is the reality of a nuclear armed world. Now, if you don't like that and I don't, then the thing to do is to work to not have a nuclear armed world. But we have to live in the world as it exists today. Yes, of course, our reaction to this whole conflict is going to be shaped by the fact that Russia has a nuclear trump card. That is just the way that it is. So to casually wave that away with a lot of sloganeering, I think if you even dig one layer below that, you see how quickly that sort of logic ultimately falls apart. Yes, they have nuclear weapons. We have to factor that in because personally, I would like the world and humanity to continue. And right now,

we are in the most dangerous situation in terms of nuclear escalation we have ever been in my entire life. And that is something that we have to think very carefully about and strategically about, even if it means that, you know, at the end of the day, whenever we do get to a place where there can be a ceasefire or some sort of diplomacy and some sort of negotiated settlement, which is the only way this ultimately ends, even if there is some concession to Russia that ultimately we don't like and the Ukrainians don't like, that is a better outcome than nuclear war. I mean, to me, it's just very simple when you look at it. Yeah, I think that's right, Crystal. All right. We have one more piece here, which is how Ukraine is doing on the battlefield right now. Let's go ahead and put this up on the screen. Let's put it up there. This is very

important. The reason is that we have said before that the actual fighting season is beginning to come to its most critical phase. So officials, lawmakers in Ukraine are saying that there is one last critical battle that they have the time for to reclaim any territory, especially in the south of the country, before the muddy and the fighting season is brought to an end because of the weather conditions. Again, very time-honored tradition when fighting in this part of the world

in World War II and in World War I and in Napoleon's invasion. The Ukrainian gains that they've had right now, there are two things that they need to do. Number one, they need to fortify their supply lines and hang on to the territory that they've claimed. Two, they need to make sure that they're not vulnerable to any sort of Russian counteroffensive.

Well, given the state of the Russian forces, I don't think they have to worry too much about that. But three, the thing is is that the next month or so is going to be the most critical phase of the war. Said that too, also after the very first successful offensive, which is they have very limited time to make the extensive gains that they have been able to. And it is during that period of instability, of annexation by Putin, where things are going to be most up in the air and the risk of nuclear confrontation, of any confrontation with the West is going to be higher.

So anyway, I thought it was important that we warn people, Crystal, that right now really is the most critical time. Also, really spooky, not just because it's October. I think we are 10 days away from the 60th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which is crazy. I remember I was like, wait a second. I was like, the Cuban Missile Crisis was in October of 1962.

So I don't know what it is about October, but spooky not only because of Halloween. And lots of hallmarks of many, many, many failed campaigns where a lot of people died, not on the Ukrainian side, but on all of those who have ever fought in this part of the world, that this time of year is when there is just, when there's war in that part of the world, the most death, the most risk, and the highest risk of confrontation appears to be emanating. So we should all be very, very paying close attention as we move. Most estimates say like mid-November or so is whenever things are going to turn for the worse in terms of weather conditions. Yeah. And even as it's unlikely that the Russian mobilization is really going to turn the tide in this war, we also shouldn't

completely rule that out. And so now it's also the time before all of those new recruits, new conscripts are mobilized into the field and trained up and really ready to go. So it's another reason why this is sort of a critical moment for the Ukrainians before winter hits. That's right. All right. We have other gigantic world news, which is OPEC. Let's go ahead and put this up on the screen. OPEC Plus has agreed to deep oil production cuts, the Biden administration calling it short-sighted.

They are, on Wednesday, they decided to curb supply in what Reuters here describes as an already tight market, causing one of the biggest clashes with the West, as the U.S. administration called it, a surprise decision short-sighted. OPEC's de facto leader, Saudi Arabia, said the cut of 2 million barrels per day, equal to 2% of global supply, was necessary to respond to rising interest rates in the West in a weaker global economy. The Kingdom rebuffed criticism that they were colluding with Russia, which is included in that OPEC Plus group, to drive prices higher and said the West was often driven by, quote, wealth arrogance when criticizing the group. There are some like technicalities in here that basically they say, well, it won't really be fully two million barrels per day because we were already underproducing. But there is no doubt that this is a gigantic cut, that it is very, very, very likely to drive up oil prices. In fact, it already has.

And that it is likely to hit your gas prices at the pump as well. The estimate we have here from a guy who's an analyst for GasBuddy, let's go ahead and put this up on the screen, is that it will likely increase U.S. gas prices by 15 to 30 cents per gallon. So that is a significant hike just from the doings of basically this one nation, Saudi Arabia. I mean, I think it's clear that there are three things going on here. Number one, they're looking out for their own financial interests. They want oil prices at $100 a barrel because they want the money. They like the money. Number two, I think they do want to help Russia be able to avoid those price caps and be able to continue earning revenue that allows them to float their war effort.

And number three, they hate the Biden administration and higher gas prices are terrible for him in terms of the midterm. So, I mean, you want to talk about like election interference. Forget about Russian Facebook memes. This is some direct foreign election interference in our midterm elections coming up here. Yeah, no, I mean, it's definitely true. It just really is humiliating for Biden on two levels. One, he went to Riyadh to go kiss MBS's ass. And MBS was still like, nah, dude, that's not going to happen. They called Riyadh, apparently, Secretary of State, the highest levels of the administration. They called Riyadh, apparently, Secretary of State, the highest

levels of the administration. They were like, do not do this, publicly asking them not to do it. What's even more of a betrayal is not only the Saudis, is the UAE, who also depends on us for a tremendous amount of weapons, economic aid, supposedly great friends and allies. And they were like, yeah, we're going with the Saudis and the Russians on this one. Number one is greed. But two, we clearly, they don't listen to us. I mean, this is, there is no other way to describe it as just a completely one-sided relationship. We give them security and hundreds, hundreds of billions of dollars in weapons, and then they do whatever they want, whatever they want.

They clearly do not think, rightfully, that the Biden administration will do anything to them. And I don't think that they're really all that incorrect. Really, I don't think we can overstate this. Beyond impact here, which is, yeah, like we said, 15, 30 cents a gallon. I'm not gonna diminish that. That's terrible.

That's actually high, and that also leaves us one refinery shock away from $5 gas again in this country. So don't estimate that. In fact, let's take a look. So national gas price right now is $3.86 a gallon. California is at $6.40, but apparently it's going to go down. Spot futures there looking like it'll normalize around five. The point being though, which is that if gas across the country goes up by 30 cents, congratulations, the entire country's over four again, which I don't think is a win at all. And it leaves you one supply shock away, one hurricane away from having $5 gas, maybe even $6, $7 gas in California.

Put that on the line. The other thing is that, put this on the screen, which is that OPEC just dealt a serious blow, Crystal, to the EU plan to try and put a cap on Russian oil. Now, we talked about why that cap is pretty much dumb in the first place, wasn't really going to do anything. But by reducing the supply, the EU price cap, which was on Thursday, actually, right today, is supposed to get voted on the final package that the entire bloc could agree to, that price cap no longer makes any sense whenever you're going to cut production back even more. And the price cap will be out of step even more so with the market price than it already was.

And if they do go ahead with it, A, the Russians will be like, OK, we're just not going to sell you all that much. And you're just going to make the Chinese and the Indians who are still buying at a market discount, but still paying a tremendous amount of money, they're going to get an even better deal on Russian oil than ever before. Well, I mean, so the price cap thing was always a little bit difficult to imagine that it was going to work out anyway. And now this makes it so much less likely. You really need China and India to go along with it in order for it to actually really work out. And now this makes it so much less likely. You really need China and India to go along with it in order for it to actually really work out. And now that looks like it's not going to happen. It makes it much, much, much less likely that India and China are going to subject themselves to that.

So, yeah, I mean, OPEC blew up the price cap idea. They are blowing up Biden's midterm chances. They are enriching themselves and just completely thumbing their nose at the Biden administration. And, you know, not to do a victory dance here, but we've been saying all along that this was a foolish way for the Biden administration to try to deal with Saudi Arabia. And, you know, clearly that has ultimately borne out. You also have at the same time, you know, some political response here at home. We'll get to the Biden administration's response, which was actually very interesting and seemed to signal that they may be shifting more to the tactics that we've been advocating

for from the beginning. But you had Congressman Ro Khanna coming out really strong with some comments about just what he thought of the Saudis and what they're doing here and how we should respond. Let's go ahead and put this up on the screen. He says in an interview with CNN, who do they think they are, slams Saudi Arabia as a third-rate power and calls for the president to retaliate if OPEC slashes oil production, which of course they just did, by cutting off Saudi access to aviation parts, Raytheon and Boeing. Let me just read you a little bit more of what he says here. He says, it's outrageous. The Saudis need to be dealt with harshly. They are a third rate power. We are the

most powerful country in the world. I do not know why we kowtow to them. He called on the president to make it clear to the Saudis that the U.S. will cut off the kingdom's aviation parts supply and prevent Raytheon and Boeing from selling to them. Quote, they are not our allies. They are hurting the American people and we need to be tough with them. The president needs to make it clear we will cut off their supply. We could ground their air force in a day. True. At the same time, Senator Chris Murphy also is calling for, who has long been a critic also of Saudi and our relationship with them, he is calling for a wholesale rethink of our relationship.

Let's take a listen. I think it is a mistake on their part. And I think it's time for a wholesale reevaluation of the U.S. alliance with Saudi Arabia. What's the point of looking the other way as the Saudis chop up journalists, repress political speech inside Saudi Arabia, if when the chips are down, the Saudis effectively choose the Russians instead of the United States? I mean, to me, the thing that Ro Khanna said, which was so clear, is they are not our allies. Like, that is so clear.

So what are we doing propping up their atrocities in Yemen and propping them up wholesale? Like, this is complete insanity at this point, and it should absolutely end. I think they're both absolutely correct. Of course. I mean, I've been waiting a long time to hear a congressman say anything like that. And just to give people some clarity, the United

States has promised Saudi Arabia over $100 billion of weapons over five years. Saudi Arabia purchases 25% of all arms produced in the United States. They are entirely reliant on us for military advisors economically, at the management level. Look, I've said before, I lived in the Gulf. These people can't even run their own countries without us if we wanted to. So that gives us a tremendous amount of leverage if we want to use it. We just don't use it, I guess, because we're too addicted to the money and willing to get slapped around, as Chris Murphy said, even when the chips are down, they side with Russia. They're like, oh, we'll help Russia out. Absolutely. It helps in helping Russia, also helps their own pocketbooks. But the Saudis and the UAE, just so people know, have been making a killing off of Russia. Here's

why. They buy Russian oil, they burn it for domestic capacity, and then they sell us all the oil they can pump out of their ground to us. So we pay a high price. And on the arbitrage, they're making an absolute killing. Apparently in Sharjah and some of the other ports in the UAE, they're taking the Russian oil, mixing it up, putting a fake label on it, and then they just sell it to the entire world market. Everybody's making a cut. The Russians getting money. The UAE's making money, only people getting ripped off are the people in this country and in California paying $6.40 a gallon.

And Europe, by the way, as well. But of course, but I'm saying the average consumer in the West is getting ripped off when all these guys are making an absolute killing. And it just bears the question of like, what's the point of this alliance? It reminds me of what I was talking about in the Ukraine block.

I'm like, what kind of country are you when you give somebody hundreds of millions of dollars, and then they don't tell you what they're doing, and they also put you in danger? And then like Saudi, hundreds of billions of dollars, and then they don't go against you and publicly slap you on the world stage. Suckers. I mean, that's what it ultimately is. And so the Biden administration did put out a response and it has one paragraph in here that's noteworthy in particular that Jeff Stein picked up on. Let's go ahead and put this up on the screen. So in the White House response, he says, key paragraph here in the statement suggests maybe U.S. interest in exploring NOPEC. I'll explain what that is in a minute. Or repealing sovereign immunity from antitrust

legislation that protects OPEC producers who manipulate energy prices would be a huge response. So NOPEC is a bill that actually could open OPEC producers up to antitrust lawsuits. Right now, they're immune from that. So basically, that would sort of take the gloves off and allow us to sue OPEC producers directly. And that would be, you know, that would be quite a shift in terms of response. Jeff Stein calls it a big response here. And let me actually pull up the paragraph because, you know, it's sort of like coded diplomatic language that you have to read into in order to see what he's talking about. But what they say is in light of today's action, the Biden administration will also consult with Congress on additional tools and authorities to reduce OPEC's control over energy prices. So what Jeff is reading into that, I think correctly,

is sort of like holding out the threat of moving forward with this bill called NOPEC that would open them up to antitrust legislation. I mean, I think that to me, the response should be exactly what Ro Khanna says. Like, okay, well then good luck with supporting your military. We're done. We're out of here. Enjoy that. We should move forward with NOPAC and, you know, open them up to antitrust lawsuits. We also should do the deal with Iran and do the deal with Venezuela as well, which actually there's news on this morning. Yeah. A big news on that front. I totally agree. I mean, at the same time, Crystal, I'm not going to hold my breath. There's no way they're going to do this. I think that the Saudis have such a tremendous hold. The Biden administration,

they talked a big game. They still went to Riyadh and now they've been slapped in the face. Will they learn? History says probably not. And we'll just continue. The last piece before we move on to news regarding Venezuela is, you know, the U.S. public would support them if they did decide to stop selling arms to Saudi Arabia. Let's go and put this up on the screen. Now, this is from a fairly hawkish outfit, which I think actually is interesting. So when survey takers were asked if the U.S. should continue its sale of weapons to Saudi, more than two thirds responded negatively. Although most Democratic and Republican respondents oppose the continuation of arms sales to Saudi Arabia, Democratic opposition thirds responded negatively. Although most Democratic and Republican respondents opposed

the continuation of arms sales to Saudi Arabia, Democratic opposition is more pronounced, nearly three quarters of Democrats, so it was Biden's own party, opposed arms sales, three quarters to Saudi Arabia, 38% somewhat disagree, 37% strongly disagree, roughly 28% of Republicans somewhat disagree, and roughly 34 percent strongly disagree. So you have bipartisan support among the population for this policy. This is a wholly, wholly mainstream view everywhere except, you know, this little beltway circle that we live in right here. Yeah, of course. I mean, anybody who's normal would hear what we just said about any of these countries who take U.S. money and then do whatever they want. Well, why do we give them money? What do we do? And instead, in Washington, they're like,

no, but you don't understand. Like, what about Iran? And we're about to talk about Iran. Yeah. What about this? And you know, norms and all that. Most people aren't stupid. Like, they know whenever somebody's getting

taken advantage of, and that's clearly exactly what's happening. And meanwhile, Jackson, Mississippi doesn't have clean drinking water. Okay, so let's get to this piece on Venezuela. Now, we brought you the news the other day, which I thought was quite noteworthy, that we actually had this prisoner exchange, which was, you know, it was some of our oil executives and it was some of Maduro's actually like relatives. So this seemed pretty noteworthy and a step forward in the relationship. We wondered if it had further significance.

Apparently it did. Let's put this up on the screen from the Wall Street Journal. U.S. looks to ease Venezuela sanctions, enabling Chevron to pump oil. The proposed deal would require Caracas to open talks with political opponents with the aim of free elections in 2024. Let me read you a little bit of this. They say in exchange for the significant sanctions relief, the government of Venezuela and President Nicolas Maduro, Maduro would resume long-suspended talks with the country's opposition to discuss conditions needed to hold free and fair presidential elections in 2024. People with knowledge said the U.S.-Venezuela's government and some Venezuelan opposition figures have also worked on a deal that would free up hundreds of millions of dollars in Venezuelan state funds frozen in American banks to

pay for imports of food, medicine, and equipment for the country's battered electricity grid and municipal water systems. Any shift in U.S. policy that brings back Western oil companies would send a psychological signal to the market that more supply is on the way, one analyst said. So I think some of the wording here is really important because I saw a headline that was like sanctions relief in exchange for free and fair elections. And I was like, I can't imagine that free and fair elections are actually going to happen here. Nor do I think, I mean, we're not demanding the Saudis have free and fair elections now, are we? So it's not like this is an even handed approach. But the language here is they're going to reopen talks with the opposition. So that to me seems like a, you know, there's a significant distinction between, all right,

we just have to reopen the talks and we're actually going to have free and fair elections. I mean, you know, we've been long advocating here. They should do this deal. It has limitations in terms of what it will actually do in terms of oil supply. The infrastructure here is sort of decayed and degraded. The amount of oil that would actually come on the market is somewhat in doubt. But what they're pointing to is the fact that, and this is really important to keep in mind with regard to the oil market and all kinds of commodity markets, that it's not just this basic economic, so here's the supply and here's the

demand and that's the price. The price is really determined based on what speculators think that the price is going to be. And even beyond that, what speculators think other speculators are going to think the price is going to be. And so that's why even something like this, when they talk about a psychological signal, and a lot of this is algorithmically driven, too. It's not even like human beings thinking about this. There's an anticipation that it will have some sort of impact on other speculators. So there are bets put in that regard that can help ease the pressure on prices ultimately. So that's what they're looking at. Yeah. I mean, I think it's, look, as you said, which is that the idea that we're supposed to buy oil only from good countries is ludicrous. I don't know why a barbarous regime, which cuts

people's heads off is any better or worse than a communist regime which is ruined a once prosperous country. I don't know. I don't particularly care. I just want some oil that's cheap. And beyond that, I want to get to a place where we don't have to buy oil from any of these places just so we never have to be put in this position. But if we're going to have so much hypocrisy in our oil markets and more, we might as well just say, hey, we'll buy it from anybody. We've got an enemy over here. We might as well buy some Venezuelan oil. The fact that it took so long is also just so absurd and just shows you why the US political system is so rotted with brain worms. Nobody squeaks a word when MBS is what he is and we buy oil from

him. But buying oil from Venezuela is like the most objectionable thing on the planet. I mean, I also do want to say like the sanctions that the Trump administration imposed have been brutally devastating for the like human beings who live in Venezuela. I mean, the economy was already for a variety of reasons, in particular, the fact that the that oil prices had gone down so significantly during COVID, which meant that, you know, the money that the Venezuelan government really relies on sort of dried up. And then they're hit with sanctions on top of that. And that just caused really total economic collapse. And not without like, even if you're like, well, I don't give a shit about them. It's not us. You know, it has a lot of domestic political reverberations here as well, because obviously we've seen a huge flood of migrants coming from Venezuela because of that economic fallout.

So in my opinion, even beyond the oil situation, which is obviously significant in terms of gas prices you pay at the pump, there is a real humanitarian justification for finding ways to ease these sanctions, which have been absolutely devastatingly brutal on those populations. Also sort of like help like kind of destabilize some of the surrounding countries there as well. I mean, look, I hope it moves speedily and it actually gets going. I think it'd probably be good for everybody if that were to be the case. Will Washington sabotage it? Probably, honestly. Like we're at a decent place. But as you said on infrastructure, there's a long way to go before any oil actually starts shipping out of that country. You know, even for Chevron to resume drilling operations and more.

And we've talked about how refinery capacity is low, how actually Venezuelan oil is difficult to refine. This stuff takes years and years to build. So we're not out of the woods in any way. But this is the type of creative diplomacy which I still will support from the Biden administration. I mean, even if you're just looking at purely our interests, do the deal with them, do the deal with Iran, say, fuck you to the Saudis. And that's to me the clear path forward right now. So let's talk about Iran because there is clearly a lot going on there. We wanted to keep our eye on the protests. Obviously, we had Dr. Trita Parsi on to break down what was happening there and how widespread they were. You know, this started all because of a young woman who was accused of like not

wearing her hijab properly by the morality police, which like just pause for a second and think of the insanity that such a thing even exists, died in their custody. You know, the family really believes that she was basically beaten to death. They deny it, but you take that for what it's worth. So those protests continue. Let's go ahead and put this up on the screen. They truly are, you know, nationwide. They're concentrated in urban centers, no doubt about it. Protests, you know, movements often are. But you have a top Iranian official here warning that protests could destabilize the country. I think that's basically being used as a justification for what has been a brutal crackdown. You've had estimates vary, but I've seen at least 50 deaths in these protests, 50 people killed in these protests.

Iran's parliamentary speaker warned Sunday the protests over the death of a young woman in police custody could destabilize the country and urge security forces to deal harshly with those he claimed endanger public order as countrywide unrest entered its third week. Posts on social media show there were scattered anti-government protests in Tehran and running clashes with security forces in other towns. Sunday, Iranian state TV has reported at least 41 protesters and police have been killed since the demonstrations began September 17th. An AP count of official statements by authorities tallied at least 14 dead with more than 1,500 demonstrators arrested. Again, tallies vary because other numbers I saw said at least 50. So there's clearly been significant loss of life here among protesters mostly, but also among some police officers.

Now, there's a few things to say about this. One thing that I think is remarkable, Sagar, and noteworthy here is that this started with the Iranian middle class, which has been, you know, sort of economically devastated over the past number of years. But it has truly spread across class groups, rural and urban centers, and also among ethnic groups. And all of that is quite remarkable, obviously, because of the circumstances that sort of kicked these protests off. They've also really centered women and been led in large part by women. And I think it's really noteworthy that they've continued as long as they have, even in spite

of this clearly brutal crackdown. The other piece of context we wanted to put up here that I thought was interesting breakdown from, let's go ahead and put the Wall Street Journal piece up on the screen here. They say Iran's crippled economy sustains protests after religious police lit flame. The country's middle class is shrinking for the first time in decades, and U.S. sanctions corruption and, or amid U.S. sanctions corruption and economic mismanagement. You know, they interviewed some some folks who are directly involved in the protest. They talked to a 52 year old homemaker who's been protesting in Tehran, taking off her hijab, waving it with crowds of other women.

And she says the roots of these protests is the economic problems. And you now see the eruption. She and her husband, who are a small food business owner, have run out of savings and inflation threatens their middle-class lifestyle. They once owned several properties, but they've had to sell them to raise cash. She said she used to buy a new car every two years, trading the old model for a new one. She recently had to sell her only car for cash to pay off loans. Some of the numbers underscoring this, the middle class is under pressure from 50% inflation. Think about that. 50% inflation, a currency that fell to its lowest levels ever this year. That means anything you import is going to be way, way, way more

expensive. That continues to feed that 50% inflation. Today, more than a third of Iran lives in poverty compared with 20% just in 2015, and the middle class has shrunk to comprise less than half the country. And that is a stunning reversal as well. The Iranian middle class has been sort of like famously robust for a long time. Of course. I mean, I think that that's actually very noteworthy, which is that at the same time that you are getting crippled economically, it's like you have somebody getting beaten, you know, possibly to death by the so-called morality. And you're just like, okay, what's the whole point? You know, with a lot of these types of regimes, the guarantee is always, yeah, you might have to live with some of our crazy stuff that the, you know, the more religious people. You're going to be able to come a doctor or a lawyer and you're going to have a stability for your family. It's complicated. People are like, well, you know, I'm not a lover of the regime, but I'm doing fine.

It's like, well, if you're not doing fine and you're getting oppressed, you're like, well, why should I have to put up with this at all? And you have two things that happen here, too. I mean, you have this total economic collapse, which is partly global economy, partly U.S. sanctions, and partly because of decisions of the Iranian government themselves. Then you have a new hardline president. So, you know, whereas previously, you know, women could kind of wear their hijab. This is my understanding based on the reporting, however they want. Now you're going to have this like harder line morality police crackdown. And so when you couple those things together, yeah, you're like, what the hell? What am I getting out of this deal? This is a nightmare.

It's an economic nightmare. And it's like a sort of like social cultural nightmare as well. And the level of like violence and brutality and all of that. So you can see how that would lead to it being a powder keg. We have, let's go and put this, show this little bit of footage here. These are girls who, this is actually a speaker from the IRGC, they're paramilitary. And the tweet that accompanied this video here, all these girls who took off their hijab and they're waving at him and they're screaming at him basically to go home, go away. They say, get lost. So this is at an all-girls school. And it's just one example of the type of protests, quite courageous, in fact, that have been going on around the country. And, you know, I know this is a little complicated because Iran is one of the

like official bad guy regimes of U.S. government. And so there's also always always speculation of like, are you know, is the CIA involved in like creating this discontent and all of these things? But it seems pretty clear this was a very organic movement that the fuse was lit by this event of police violence that, you know, there was already all this like economic discontent and kindling there. And the last thing I want to say is I do see some people who are like, oh, see, this justifies the sanctions. This is what we wanted to get. And I think that's absurd. Like it's immoral to punish a population and try to strangle them with the hope of like, maybe they'll rise up and get rid of the regime. Yeah. I mean, I don't think there's much else to say except like, I wish them the best and I hope it leads to some societal change in Iran. You know, look, I mean, they've got long odds. I think we got to be really clear. Yeah. We should be honest, which is that at the end of the day, the Iranian regime has been willing to use deadly

force to a historic degree in order to have its preservation. Kind of a longstanding tradition with authoritarian governments. That being said, it works until it doesn't work. So maybe this is the one case. I have my doubts. It's been going on for a long time. But it is important that we understand what exactly is being protested over there. And I don't live in Iran. I don't know how widespread it actually is from what is leaking out and what is being brought attention to. It seems like some portion of the public of which we should obviously support in any way that we possibly can. So yeah, like I said, I wish him the absolute best. I've lived in Islamic theocracies before, and it is stifling. It's horrific. I will never forget that. It made me such an appreciator of just our society, like watching women completely clad

in the niqab, walking 10 steps behind their husbands and hearing stories about the way that they're treated at home. They have no rights. They can't leave the country, just for context, he's living in Qatar. I mean, even some of these princesses, they're wealthy, but they have no authority. They can't even get on a plane

without the permission of their fathers or their husbands married off against their will. It really is horrific. I can't even believe that it exists in the year 2022. So to the extent that still exists in Iran, which it certainly does with these so-called morality police, I wish them the best. I don't think any human being, especially women, deserves to live like that. Yeah, no, I mean, there's no doubt about that. And the last piece that I will say, which I mean, maybe it's, I don't know how you feel about me saying it, but it's also bears keeping in mind that like, you know, we had the Arab Spring, there was a lot of hope that you would have these more like reformists, more sort

of open, liberal, tolerant, democratic regimes. And unfortunately, it didn't work out. And, you know, you have a situation in Iran, where in a previous set of protests several years back, they basically like forcibly disbanded the labor unions and a lot of the sort of like civil society organizations that could form the bedrock of if you were going to have an actual revolution, a new government and all those sorts of things. So that just makes the odds that much more difficult. But we don't want to lose sight of their struggle because you do have people who are really, you know, courageously fighting right now and for a very just cause. Yeah, I think that's very true.

Okay. At the same time, there are doings at Amazon, and this is pretty interesting as well. Let's go ahead and put this up on the screen. Ironically, from a Washington Post reporter, who is quite a good labor reporter though, Lauren Gurley, for Bezos's paper there. So she says, scoop, Amazon has suspended 50 warehouse workers. The number I saw this morning is actually 80 now, and union organizers who participated in a work stoppage last night in Staten Island following a fire. That suspension occurs less than 10 days out from a union election at an Amazon warehouse in Albany, she says. So basically what happened here, this is the warehouse that is now organized, which means that workers have more of a say than they have more power in their workplace. And they feel themselves able to band together and assert their their demands for their own safety and working conditions. So a fire, a significant fire broke out at a trash compactor.

And let's go ahead and show we have Chris Smalls tweeted this, this out. Let's take a look. So for those of you who are just watching, you can see the fire, you can see, you know, like the conveyor belts and everything at the Amazon warehouse. And you can see these workers like, you know, freaking out and saying, we got to evacuate. They were evacuated. The day shift workers were told they could go. And the night shift workers, though, were told they have to go back to work. These workers did not feel that it was safe.

There were a lot of like toxic fumes in the air. They found it very difficult ultimately to breathe. And so let's go and put this next piece up on the screen. So they went forward with a work stoppage. Amazon says it was a small group of workers. Reports say that it was somewhere between 100 and 650 workers who participated in this wildcat sit-down strike, marched to the manager's office to deliver demands. And now some sizable portion of them have been suspended all because they found the working conditions unsafe and did not want to continue. At the same time,

there have now been, and put this up on the screen from Jordan, there was another fire down at an Amazon warehouse in Alabama. And then just this morning, he texted me there was another fire. This one in, I believe this is in Albany, that the latest fire was as well. So, I mean, what the hell is going on here ultimately with these workers being put at risk? Like, why can you not keep these facilities safe? Why can you not listen to the workers? And then why are you retaliating in this way against workers who are actually told by a manager, and this is recorded on video, Stephen Greenhouse tweeting this out this morning, are actually told, like, if you feel unsafe, you can go home. And then they say, okay, we're not going back to work. And then they're suspended.

Wow. So they're literally getting effectively retaliated against for not wanting to be around chemical fires whenever they're at work? Yes. Yeah. I mean, the video speaks for itself, in my opinion, which is like there's literally the place is on fire. It's terrifying. They also don't necessarily have very good workplace protections.

Some of these people are on a contract basis, so it's not like they're going to get all they don't have the benefits or the fallbacks that a lot of others do. Also, we should know, you know, we're entering the holiday season-ish, whenever things ramp up significantly. I think Amazon and Walmart and all their other seasonal workforce explodes by like 40% or something in these times in order to keep up with demand. So what type of training do they have? They're around unsafe equipment.

Look, it will always highlight to me of, there's a cost. I go on Amazon and it's like like it can be delivered to you today. And I'm like, wow, that's nuts. And I'm like, well, this is why. Like, this is the reason why. Yeah, because of all the corners they cut. And I mean, it's also really clear here.

Like, they want to send a message to not just these workers who dared defy them and unionize, but also to all of the other Amazon warehouse around the country that are thinking of unionizing. And that warehouse in Albany, their election is mere days away. So they've indefinitely suspended, according to Amazon Labor Union's lawyer, at least 80 workers for not returning to work. That, again, in spite of the fact that there was a fire with chemicals in the air and an Amazon manager on video told the workers, if you feel unsafe, please leave. So that's how they treat their workers there. It's so terrible. It really is.

And I also think it's a media story in that, look, I mean, props, I guess, to this Washington Post person for bringing this up. But in general, you know, we just spend so little time. We spend time litigating, like, media corporation beefs with each other. We spend time reading about five people in a tech company who feel unsafe because an email goes. And I'm not going to say that's not important. Sure, I enjoy reading them for schadenfreude perspectives. But Amazon is the second largest employer in the United States, very on track to become one of the largest. And the day-to-day experience of most people in their jobs is not represented in media.

And I think that is like the meta level of like why it's so important to look at this, which is that most people who work in white collar have never even been in an experience where a fire is possible at work. And if there was, they'd have like an HR training session where they're like listening to each other about how traumatic the entire thing was. Here, they're like, screw you, get back to work. Get back to work right after the fire went on. Imagine, I don't think most white collar workers have ever been in a situation like that. The reason we've always covered Amazon almost obsessively is because it is so ignored, but also because it's like as important to the U.S.

economy as the U.S. government is. It really is. The number of people they employ, the way it shapes the economy, the way it shapes their tax laws, the way, you know, the way they lobby for the perks that they want, the way they reshape towns themselves and cities themselves is so incredibly significant to all of our lives and certainly to working class people. So another sign of the way they treat their workforce. And look, I think it's also an important lesson, too, and why it matters to have a union, because now these workers, there will be a grievance process. They won't be just like out of luck and that's that. They'll be able to have some sort of concerted effort to fight back here. And even the fact that they felt bold enough, like there's probably no other Amazon warehouse in the country where they would have had

the boldness to actually band together and say, hey, this isn't right. We're not going back to work. This isn't safe. That all comes from having that solidarity together. Absolutely correct. Okay. Move on. The fun block, the fun story. I'm really obsessed with this just because I think it is so funny and it reveals exactly what type of COVID misinformation is okay and what's not. So let's put this up there on the screen. Effectively, and let's keep it up there for a little bit, guys. What happened is that the New York Post wrote a story about how Howard Stern, who apparently is a massive germaphobe, left his bunker to dine with friends for the first time since 2020. And that happened a couple of days ago, which means that he was basically inside and isolated

from people for over two years, which is crazy. And Helene Olin, who is a Washington Post columnist, says, quote, at some point, we need to have a conversation about the people still too afraid to leave their homes because of COVID. I personally know of two such cases. This is not a healthy way to live. I don't possibly know how you could disagree with that. And yet the Washington Post's Taylor Lorenz, lead hall monitor, as you said. She replies, quote, What an absurd, insensitive thing to post. Thousands are dying per week.

Millions are disabled. Here's the key part. We have zero effective drugs that prevent infection. Immunocompromised people don't deserve condescending comments about being too afraid of a virus that can kill or severely disable us. Again, she claims to be immunocompromised. I don't know if she is or not. A lot of people say things online.

But let's take that with whatever the grain of salt that you must. And let's take and examine that claim. A, there is zero effective drug for immunocompromised people. Now, hold on a second. What you're saying there then is that not just vaccination, that Paxlovid, all the therapeutics that we have at our disposal, all of the different drugs and research that have gone into mitigating COVID, preventing COVID infection, all of that have not borne out whatsoever. And it's just completely untrue. Put this up there from Zeynek Tufekci, who works over at the New York Times. She said in a very clear subtweet, quote, there seems to be a lot of

misinformation going around that immunocompromised people don't benefit at all from vaccines or existing COVID therapies. That is absolutely false and a very dangerous falsehood to spread. Such people might not even realize the many options that they have. First of all, we have a lot of data to show immunocompromised people generate antibodies after vaccination. They may need more in terms of booster dosages, etc. Two, they have shown that there is a specific drug that has already been available for more than a year called Evusheld, which has been repeatedly shown to bring many immunocompromised people back to non-immunocompromised person levels for six months or more at a time, even when adjusted to variants. In addition,

monoclonal antibodies, if they were to be infected, and of course, Paxlovid if they're also infected in order to mitigate the disease. The point being that, guess what? Even if you're immunocompromised, you might have to take it more seriously and you might have to have a frontline treatment more immediately than if you or I were to get COVID, but you can still exist in society as before. I mean, effectively your risk of contracting COVID is basically the same as if you can, you get any virus whenever you are immunocompromised. Yes. Is it more of a risk than ever or than most of the general population? Sure. But that doesn't mean that you should be living as some like strange hermit who doesn't leave their house for two and a half years, especially a guy like

look people are free to do what they want i mean that's what i was gonna say yeah and if you're howard's right yeah be my guest in your like mansion for right by yourself or two okay fine do whatever you do you that's fine if you're taylor runs and you make the same choice okay that's fine but don't like try to persuade other people this is what they should be doing um i'm actually glad she tweeted though because I didn't know some of this information about how effective some of these treatments are for immunocompromised people. And I think it's important also in terms of, you know, there is this small faction that is still very committed to like, we should still be in lockdown and we should still be like banning indoor dining and

things of that nature. And immunocompromised people is kind of like the Trump card that they pull out. Like, well, what about these people? And so I think it is important to know that there are, in fact, effective therapeutics that, of course, you know, we want to be like considerate of everyone and make sure we're like taking everybody's health concerns seriously. But it's sometimes portrayed like an instant death sentence for people who are immunocompromised, and that's clearly not scientifically or factually based, so important to know that. Yeah, there are a lot of drugs that are available.

Also, there are lifestyle interventions that's available. A lot of immunocompromised people could just lose some weight, and they would be much better. Most people could be better off if they were losing some weight. There's many different things. If you want to have the discussion, we certainly can. But at a societal level, we long accepted that there are viruses, the flu virus, et cetera. I mean, so many different, norovirus, any of these things that can be spreading.

Every one of those viruses in my household this year. Yeah, I know. Crystal's got small children, which apparently are like sucking. Oh, my God. I do think it's a thing. They're like petri dishes. Oh, it's disgusting. I think especially They're like. Oh my God. I do think it's a thing. They're like petri dishes. Ugh. It's disgusting. I think especially my youngest is in kindergarten this year.

And I do think it's. There's something with like. This is the first year with everyone's like fully unmasked. And so they're getting every single. It's hard to even distinguish. Right. Between from one virus to the next of everything that they've had. But anyway.

We're all good. Everybody this week is healthy. So it's good. And actually in the long run, probably better, right? Good for the immune system. You get the antibodies. That's what I'm told. All that going on.

I think a lot of my early travel to Asia as a child, I've got an iron stomach as a result of that. I'm sure. I bet that does have a lot to do with it. It's got to have something. You can't deny it. Anyway, the point is that this is a perfect view into the hypocrisy of the type of COVID misinformation

which you are allowed to spread. She was not banned. Which doesn't get called into question. She didn't even get the little flag on it. No flag, no nothing. Yeah. Other than the utter ridicule of her colleagues and the general eye rolls of the public. She must have gotten used to that by now.

Oh, yeah, she probably is. All right, Zach, what are you looking at? Let me start with this. I don't think Twitter is really going to change that much from where it is right now if Elon does actually buy it. The single biggest change might be an invitation for Trump to come back. Beyond that impact, though, is not about who will come back, but is more likely about what won't happen in the future. The problem with Twitter and its censorship regime, which has really been embraced by all of the big tech companies, is that we all know that their so-called policies are completely fake. They say they have a policy, then some activist says, yeah, but I'm being harmed because somebody said something mean about me.

Then a professional cadre of journalists jump on the bandwagon. The tech companies say days later they have updated their policy and they are now banning whomever the activists and the journalists want them to. Cycles that have basically been on repeat since Alex Jones was banned. Look, no further than the latest moral panic sparked by the questionable keffels against Kiwi Farms for how it is still alive and well today. There really are only two losers when it comes to Elon's purchase of Twitter. One is Elon himself, who entered into a deal at the top of the market and is about to pay over double what Twitter is actually worth. I have not and will not bet against him, but he certainly does have a titanic task ahead of him, just as big as getting the first SpaceX rocket before him off the ground. It will almost certainly lose a lot of money for

years to come if he ever does make it back at all. Two, though, the losers are the journalists, specifically a certain brand of them who identify as misinformation specialists. It's difficult to describe exactly what these people do because it is so banal, it almost can't be real. It's a job with so much power. At their core, it's basically enforcers for whatever the current cause celeb is.

If the zeitgeist has decided a certain group is bad, it's their job to prove they are bad through journalism. And by that, I mean writing fake articles, quoting fake experts who advocate for censorship, and hounding tech companies for comment until they ban the person that they want gone. So predictably, the people most upset are the people who are going to lose this power. Let's get acquainted with them. Perhaps the worst offender, aside from Taylor Lorenz, is one Ben Collins over at NBC News. Collins threw a fit when the news broke that Elon would after all buy Twitter, saying, quote, I do think this site can and will change dramatically if Musk gets full control. Adding, if it gets done early enough,

it could actually affect the midterms. Really? Continue, Ben. He adds, quote, he can elevate any idea or person he wants, their recommendations and UX choices. There will be no oversight on this private company. So who wants to tell him? The true insanity of Collins' protest is a few admissions. First is that content moderation policies on one of the largest social platforms on earth can and probably could sway the election. If that remains true of Musk, if he buys it, then by definition, it is already the case. In which case, cases like censoring that Hunter Biden laptop story,

removing or censoring elected government officials is itself election interference. In fact, the only story to arise so far from the corporate press coverage of Elon's Musk decision to buy Twitter is how much the mask has come off in the ramifications of these decisions that they have been in charge now for some time. Politico arguably had the most to-the-point headline of all of them. Quote, Musk to buy Twitter after all, in reversal that will reshape 2024.

Consider that. To date, that argument has been simple. Twitter is a private company. It can do whatever it wants. Content moderation on the platform is about protecting users. If you allege it has electoral ramifications or anything else, you're a conspiracy theorist. And yet, here they are now saying it out in the open because now it might have electoral ramifications that they don't control. What's so telling to me are the people that highlight to quote as to why this is

dangerous. The first person quoted in the story is some guy named Evan Feeney, the deputy senior campaign director at the Color of Change, which is a so-called civil rights group. He tells Politico, quote, free speech is bad because, quote, the changing of policies around misinformation, election ads, content, and undoing bans will be harmful effects on black users and voters. Adding, the deal going through was already going to be harmful. The deal going through in this moment amplifies the harms that are going to unfold. The next person they quote also posits this quote, when hate harassment campaigns run on Twitter, especially those that target women and women of color in particular, we know that those campaigns are designed to shut people up and to

actually shut down free speech. It's like woke word salad. It's unprovable. They just assert these things. It's going to be bad for minorities because that's what's on our new national religion dictates. Going against it thus is heresy. In fact, electorally, the smartest take I've seen yet, this is great for Democrats. Letting Trump back on Twitter would be good for the Democratic Party. Even going so far as to let outright racists would probably be good too. Why? Because censorship, most pernicious action, is removal from conversation. Sometimes having a bad conversation and staring something right in the face is exactly what spurs people to action. Trump being off Twitter is the best thing that ever happened to him. No more facelift tweets about Mika Brzezinski, no more insight into

his bizarre obsessions. The only things that bleed through into public discourse are his political attacks, not his moronic musings about cable news ratings when he literally had the most important job in the world. Twitter was a perfect view into how vacuous and obsessed with trivial drama that he actually was. People should see that and make up their mind. I believe this to be the case with all public discourse. Allowing speech and grappling with it in its entirety is actually the best way to achieve social consensus. We deserve to see who Trump really is. We deserve to see who any elected official is, to the extent that they allow us to see them. It actually makes us better

citizens, even if we don't like it on occasion. You can't hide things because you don't like in a democracy, because eventually people will make their will known. I'd rather it be known always instead of just a surprise every single time we have an election. Where did these people even come from, we ask? That's always- And if you want to hear my reaction to Sagar's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. War, the politicians that sell us out, the addiction crisis, the hollowed-out industrial Midwest, the war-hungry military-industrial complex, the lying partisan media, the climate crisis, all the way down to, let's say, Kim Kardashian scanning her fans in a crypto scheme, or to a tongue of Iloa sent back into the field to risk his life after suffering a concussion,

risking it all. Why? Because the coaches in NFL brass care more about the almighty dollar than about the human beings whose lives and health they've been entrusted with. Now, normally, when we talk about these issues, I'll talk about the corrupting influence of money. I'll inveigh against the dangers of putting profits over everything else, including health, family, peace, and human life. But there is a name for the system that puts profits above any other value, and the name of that system is capitalism. Now, you might call it unchecked or unfettered capitalism, you might argue that we're just doing capitalism the wrong way, perhaps. But at the core of all these issues, which have been allowed to fester and grow into a destabilizing, possibly world-ending mess, is capitalism. And specifically, capitalism of the type ushered in

by the Reagan, Clinton, Bush, Obama neoliberal era. Now I've just found out I have an unlikely ally in my assessment of the situation, comedian Bill Burr. Take a listen as he responds to a message that he received from a conservative fan who was upset that Burr had favorably mentioned socialism. Last week you mentioned you don't know why people demonize socialism. I was really taken aback at that statement. Oh, Jesus Christ. Every country that has tried socialism has failed, and it's responsible for tens of millions of deaths. All right, so would you say capitalism is working? It is not, you know, when like, what is it, like 99% of the wealth is in like fucking 2% of the people's

hands? All of these tent cities, you're telling me this is working? You don't think capitalism is responsible for tens of millions of deaths? Anyway, Russia, Germany, China, Cuba, and most recently Venezuela have tried, or right now are socialist countries. As far as I know, whatever Cuba was trying to do, we prevented them from doing

with a fucking embargo or whatever the hell we did. We've been fucking with them for 60 years. So I think you're looking at like, you know, like what a lot of people do is you look at your own country through rose-colored glasses, the same way you look at your own sports team, like, oh, my team doesn't cheat, but your team does. You're, you're really, you're really sort of looking the other way with what capitalism has done to other countries. All the sweatshop labor, all the wars we fought over,

air quote, freedom, where most of it is about, you know, natural resources, all of these fucking countries where we've gone in and, you know, stuck in heads of the government that are going to do what we want to do so we can fucking take advantage of them. I mean, to sit there and look at capitalism,

like it's, you know, I don't know, dude. It goes on, by the way, mocking the listener for pointing out ills of communism that have all been replicated under capitalism, things like racist scapegoating, government surveillance, genocide, destruction of the middle class. But a really key point here that I think is worth reiterating is this idea from Burr that we look at our own country and our own systems through rose-colored glasses. We've been schooled our whole lives in the worst of what happened under authoritarian communists, primarily the Soviet Union, of course.

And I am not here to stand for any authoritarians on the left or the right, nor am I interested in rewriting history with regards to the failures of full-scale government central planning. But what Burr is saying is absolutely true. We're trained to keep blinders on when it comes to seeing the ills of American society,

which are, in part at least, caused by capitalism. There is in D.C. a new museum. It's called the Victims of Communism. And I wish I was kidding when I tell you that the park right across the street houses a sizable homeless encampment. Dozens of tents lined up, people suffering with mental health issues,

addiction issues, all sorts of things have been chewed up and spit out by our society. Many days, you can see these victims of capitalism literally sitting on the steps of the Victims of Communism Museum. I cannot think of a more perfect encapsulation of our cultural blindness to the rot caused by our own system,

which we live with every single day. But since it's the water that we swim in, sometimes we just can't see it. Let's just do one super clear example here of what I mean, which is to dig into the opioid addiction crisis. Now, you probably know the outlines of the story. We've covered it a lot here. But basically, the Sackler family, owners of Purdue Pharma,

start selling Oxy, pushing it as a non-addictive painkiller. That assessment, by the way, that it was non-addictive, that was based on basically nothing and given a rubber stamp by a government regulator who then went and turned around to work for Purdue Pharma. There's that almighty dollar again. Doctors who get frequent visits and goodies and trips and dinners from pharma reps, they start prescribing Oxy for kids who get sports injuries, laborers who suffer from chronic pain, and its use becomes commonplace,

especially in places that were devastated by job loss thanks to capitalism. The Sacklers knew almost immediately after that drug was introduced in 1996 use becomes commonplace, especially in places that were devastated by job loss thanks to capitalism. The Sacklers knew almost immediately after that drug was introduced in 1996 that Oxy was addictive and was being routinely abused, including being crushed and snorted, that doctors were sometimes selling prescriptions, that the drug was being stolen routinely from pharmacies and then sold on the street. But they did worse than nothing. They buried the evidence. They doubled down on that popular drug that was making them billions of dollars, pushing it rather than backing off. We all know what happened next. We ended up with the worst overdose crisis in our nation's history. Deaths from opioids skyrocketed as those who started with Oxy switched to heroin

and then fentanyl, leaving behind a trail of misery, pain, and death. Now, you could say the Sacklers are evil. No argument for me there. But in another way, they're also totally unremarkable. They are creatures birthed by capitalism, a system that is designed to put money before lives. After all, they were far from the only ones who got in on this multi-billion dollar grift. Johnson & Johnson, McKinsey Consulting, Endo International, Teva, and on and on and on. All major companies that profited from their role in creating the opioid crisis. No drug cartel could possibly have done to this country what these blue-chip American multinationals did.

Some of these are public companies too. That means that they are actually duty bound by their responsibility to their shareholders to push dangerous pills on the population if it means getting a little bit better return on investment. Think of how utterly disgusting that is. And yet that's not a bug of our capitalist system. It's a feature. Capitalism created the jobless misery, the profitable pill to numb the pain, the cover-up to keep it going for decades, and the perfect excuse, personal responsibility, to keep those suffering treated as criminals rather than humans who are worthy of care. Now, I think conservatives would tend to look at this series of events and they would focus on the individual failings,

the greedy sacklers, the corrupt regulators, the drug traffickers who brought in the fentanyl, even those who allowed themselves to become addicted as the rightists tended to view addiction as a moral and criminal issue rather than as a public health issue. That's why, to the extent there's a right-wing critique of corporations now, it centers on the individual ideologies held by corporate executives rather than that overall system as a whole. The woke HR executive, for one example. The answer, they would argue, to this whole problem comes from locking up the bad guys, bolstering those institutions that would improve the morality and values of the population, primarily the church and the family, while attacking those

institutions they believe are degrading public values like elite universities. Now listen guys, I literally live in the town where I grew up in. I'm close to my parents. I believe family and community are absolutely critical to human thriving. And by the way, I do think that capitalism is also destroying those institutions of meaning, but I'll save that piece for another day. But while individuals certainly have agency in their lives and should be accountable for their actions, as a people, we are utterly powerless before the overwhelming forces that our economic system has unleashed.

How are you going to faith and family your way out of every job in your town being shipped overseas so that profit margins can go up a tick? How are you going to bootstrap your way out of a system of surveillance capitalism that is constantly devising new ways to colonize your mind and keep you glued to your screens? How are you going to personal responsibility your way out of endless wars to feed a profit-hungry military-industrial complex that is literally content to risk nuclear war if it means a better earnings call. Problem isn't wokeness or college kids or trans teens or public school teachers. It's capitalism that wants to turn you into that generic, unthinking, profitable, sheep-like consumer. Now, liberals, of course, they've got their own version of the personal responsibility narrative, by the way. The problem

is the deplorables or the Karens or the toxic masculinity. If there were more women and people of color running these corporations, then the government wouldn't be so horrible. The corporations wouldn't be so horrible, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. This all, of course, is a distraction from the real issues. We can do better than accepting the deaths of despair and the skyrocketing costs and the destroyed middle class and the endless wars and the murderous healthcare system that we have now. There are a lot of options on the path between the corporate run state we live in now and some Stalin style authoritarian central planning nightmare. In fact, persuading Americans that our only options are

Stalin or the Kochs is a pretty key way that the radical and deadly status quo is preserved for all those who profit from it. Bill Burr has it absolutely right. Time to take the blinders off on the victims of capitalism who are all around us. And Sagar went a little deep there. And if you want to hear my reaction to Crystal's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. Joining us now is author Nicholas Eberstadt. He's the author of a fantastic book, Men Without Work. Let's go ahead and put it up there on the screen, which actually has a new introduction, which is part of the reason that we all wanted to talk.

Men Without Work, which demonstrates a crisis of male wages, of unemployment, talks about some of the reasons. So just for context, Nick, we actually recently had Richard Reeves on to discuss his book of Boys and Men, and we got a tremendous response from our audience, and it's something we want to tug on a little bit more. I was familiar with your work now for quite some time. So just describe maybe the original thesis of the book and then why it becomes even more relevant in the aftershock of the COVID lockdowns and the economy that we're all living in in 2022. Sure. Well, it's a problem that's been hiding in plain sight for almost two generations. We've been seeing this previously invisible crisis of the collapse of work for men, mainly driven by an exit from the

workforce of prime age men of 25 to 54 year olds, let's say. It's been almost a straight line up from 65 to the present. I put out the first edition of this book in 2016, And the unnerving, eerie thing is the line I calculated for the exit from the workforce, which is almost straight, has just continued right on from 2016 to the present. So we've got more than 7 million prime age guys neither working nor looking for work. For every guy who's unemployed, there are over four who are neither working nor looking for work today. And that is why male work rates are now kind of at about 1937 levels. We have a depression scale problem of work for men on our hands right now. And that's obviously not the only thing going wrong in our workforce right now. So do we know what men are, those men are doing instead of working in regular jobs?

And also I was curious in the statistics, do things like, you know, driving for Uber or these sort of like gig economy type of work, does that, is that included in the statistics of men who are working? That's supposed to be included, Crystal. I mean, you know, in principle, in practice, some of it may be missed. In practice, some moonlighting may be missed. But the scale of the problem, I think, is basically pretty for real. I think the scale of the problem isn't artificial.

And so do we have a sense of, like, what they're doing with their days instead of work? So about a tenth, maybe a little more than a tenth of these guys who are not in the workforce are really full-time students. The way they behave, the way they act is more or less like people who are employed, not surprisingly, because they're expecting to get back into the workforce. For the overwhelming majority, though, the people who are neither employed nor in education and training, you've got a really dispiriting picture that is being painted by them, by their self-reported answers to surveys about how they spend their time. They basically say that they don't do civil society, that they don't do worship or charity or volunteering. They say that they do remarkably little help around the house, either with people at home or with housework.

What they report doing most is watching. We can't tell from the surveys what they're watching. We can't tell what type of devices or what the content is. But like 2,000 hours a year, as if it were a full-time job. And before the pandemic, they also reported, almost half of these men reported, that they were taking pain medication every day, some type of pain medication. So we've got a kind of a tableau suggesting that people are kind of prepping for deaths of despair in too many cases. And so what are the downstream social effects of this? Like,

why is this? Why should people care? In essence, what socialized costs are all of us incurring as a result of this crisis? You know, I've thought about that a lot, Sagar. And as far as I can tell, there's absolutely nothing good that comes out of this. It leads to this huge gap in our workforce means slower economic growth. It also means bigger income and wealth gaps in our society. It probably means more dependence upon social programs and social welfare over the long term, more pressure on fragile families, less social mobility, less involvement in society and trust in institutions. There's just, you do the 360, there is nothing good that comes out of this.

And what do you see as the spark that set this process in motion? Because I believe you said it's basically a straight line since I think you said 1965. So what starts to happen that changes the dynamic that leads to this sort of, not just dropping out of the workforce, but becoming a sort of observer of society rather than a participant in altogether?

It's a really profound question, Crystal. And since this has been going on for over half a century, I mean, it's an established historical fact, a big fact. And like other big established historical facts, it's probably got a lot of influences intertwined there. I can point to a couple of things. I mean, one has been the erosion of the previous family order in the United States, because the men who are never married or don't have kids at home are way less likely to be involved in the workforce, too. Another is the expansion of social welfare benefits. Our system is very stingy, I've been told by anybody I talk to in Europe or other affluent societies in the world.

But there can still be perverse disincentives, especially in our, I think in our disability archipelago of programs, to infantilize people who shouldn't be affected that way. We've seen, we've also seen the explosion of crime and the explosion of punishment. This is a really big one. Our government does not collect any decent data on our invisible ex-con population, but we have reason to think that there are now 25 million American adults who have a felony in their background. And you know that mass incarceration is the problem we talk about. It's like two million people. That's less than a tenth of this big problem I'm mentioning. So about one in seven adult guys, by my calculation,

has a felony in his background. And that has to be a big part of what we're seeing here. Are we seeing a similar trend in other developed nations or is the U.S. alone in this? In every rich country, you see some decline in prime male labor force involvement. There is no other country in the rich democratic world that has had such a steady plunge as ours. I mean, of the two big rich countries in the world, the ones that are closest to being twins are Canada and the US. And our decline is way worse than Canada's.

And so in terms of solutions, what do you propose? Is it just socializing the conversation, getting people to debate it, getting people to acknowledge the facts? Because I don't see them really represented in our culture at all. No, I mean, this is an invisible crisis still. It baffles me why people aren't talking about this. I mean, maybe because the guys are too often dying deaths of despair and they're not burning cars or seeming to be a menace to society. In terms of big solutions,

I forgot my magic wand today, so I can't fix the family and do other sorts of fundamental changes in our society. But government can still do things. We've got this gigantic vocational skill gap because our broken education system isn't preparing everybody the way they should to have a marketable skill when they graduate from K through 12 or from college. We need, I think, to have a work first principle in our social welfare programs. That might turn out to be more expensive. But even if it were more expensive, I think the consequences would be better for our society. And we should be shining a spotlight on our invisible ex-con population. I mean, we can't have evidence-based policies for getting these millions and millions of Americans back into employment and families and societies if we don't have the evidence.

One thing that I think is important, distinction that you have been making, which I think really matters is, you know, to me, like work is not everything. There are a lot of ways to find meaning in life that's outside of like a nine to five job. But what you're pointing to is a larger crisis of just sort of total disconnection. And as you're saying, I can't imagine that that ends in any good place, certainly for these individual men, for, you know, the people who are around them who may depend on them for various things or for society as a whole. Do we have any sort of historical models of what this looks like? Well, yeah. I mean, back in the 1800s, there was a sociologist called Emil Durkheim who talked about anomie and atomization.

He did a lot of work on suicide and things like that. I mean, if you want to kind of play fancy pants, you can go all the way back to Aristotle and talk about how he noticed that human beings were social creatures, that they needed to be part of society to thrive. And that part of our human nature, I don't think has changed in 2,500 years. So you've got people who are dropped out of work, dropped out of family, dropped out of community,

dropped out of faith. Why do we think this experiment could end well ever? Yeah, I think that's really well said. Last question for you. You talked about some of the sort of like the sticks in particular of, you know, having a work requirement for welfare programs. I'm a little bit skeptical of that, especially because of the evidence around universal basic income that shows there isn't really a drop off in like interest or working when you receive those payments. We'll put that debate aside. What about just making work more appealing? I mean, during the time period you're talking about, you've had union rates massively declining

over some significant portion of those decades. You've actually had male wages going down. So it's not crazy for guys to look at that and say, this is just not worth it. I can work my ass off and still not be able to buy a house, have a family, live that American dream. So why should I bother? Well, I think we had a little bit of a kind of a natural experiment during the pandemic. In 2020 and 2021, immigration to the United States was severely disrupted. There was all of this argument about our immigrants stealing American jobs. The native U.S.-born work rate for guys did not go up, or for anybody else, did not go up during that period. It's still way lower than it was before the pandemic. We had a more rapid increase in wages,

especially for the lower occupational skill levels in 2021 than we'd had in a long time. And it didn't seem to have a big effect of bringing people back. I mean, there's a very good argument for having higher wages because we want to have a prosperous society and we want to have escalators that work for people. The troubling thing is that there's reason to think that once people drop out of the labor force, especially guys from this prime age group, that they tend to remain long timers, long termers. That isn't so much, that has not been true with women so much. I mean, we have the existence proof of moms who go out of the workforce and go back in,

but they have a very different set of skills. They don't get any sick days or vacation days from their kids, right? They're reliable, dependable people that employers want. The sorts of habits that people develop if they're guys on the couch with pain medication is not what employers are looking for. Wow. Really interesting subject. You know, I think we're just going to have to keep diving into it. And I appreciate your work just putting the data out there.

You know, data in itself is a way for us to spark the conversation. So thanks very much, sir. Thank you for joining us. Great talking to you. Pleasure. Absolutely. Thank you guys so much for watching. We really appreciate your support.

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